How to Get Rid of Jealousy? (Once and for All)

 

“Oh dear God, I wish I could be taller than him”, “If only I could be more muscular like my childhood friend John”, “My wife has been prioritizing work over me”, “I wonder why does my dog give more attention to my bf”, “God, my family should have been more open-minded like the Snell’s”, “Why didn’t my career take off like her!” All these statements have one thing in common—they all have a pinch of jealousy sprinkled all over them. And that’s precisely what you are gonna witness today, “How to Get Rid of Jealousy?”

Jealousy is like a nonstop alarm beeping all the time directly over our heads, reminding us how shitty we are in every arena of life. It will undermine, sabotage, weaken, diminish, impede, hinder, and damage you. Hence, it’s imperative we snooze this alarm once and for all and get rid of jealousy for good.

Probably no one enjoys feeling jealous but still, at times it seems like one can’t exactly control it. It’s like it almost becomes inevitable for us to get rid of jealousy and it happens with almost everybody. The guy you are jealous of is likely to be jealous of someone else for sure. Thus, it becomes crucial for us to learn to deal with and eventually overcome jealousy which can and will have a huge positive impact on our career, relationships, and our personal goals in the long run.

Jealousy is a pretty nasty thief. It robs us of our happiness, our peace of mind, our calm, the feeling of contentment, and leaves us with hatred, restlessness, a sense of incompleteness, insecurity, helplessness, anger, and resentment. All the more reasons for us to know how to get rid of jealousy.

 

Jealousy and Success Are Mutually Exclusive

A jealous person isn’t likely to be successful, as he will always look for excuses to justify his failure and a successful person won’t be jealous because he would be too busy being awesome.

Let’s say two colleagues started at the same time to become renowned actors and act in movies. Fast forward two years, one of them has signed multiple contracts with all the big production houses and is on his way to becoming an A-list actor very soon. While the other guy is barely able to stay afloat. He is still stuck doing theatre for a local company and is unable to leave his mark.

Now, since they both started at the same point, the second guy becomes jealous of the first guy, looking at his achievements and prosperity. And it’s this very jealousy that’s making him throw excuses to justify his position—“Oh, he is a tall guy with a better face cut”, “His dad has many connections in the film industry”, “He just got lucky”, and so on.

We become so intellectually clouded, thanks to jealousy, that we start rationalizing our own balls up. You see, failing in something isn’t the problem, but you defending your shortfall and refusing to grow is the real stumbling block that you wanna overcome. 

Ideally, the other guy should throw his jealousy down the bin and try to grasp what did the first guy know that made him successful in the first place. There definitely is something or the other that the guy did or knows which attributed to his wild success spree, which the other guy was obviously totally oblivious of. All it takes is a slight change of one’s vision and how one perceives things to turn the tables around.

The best way to get rid of jealousy is to focus on learning something new, improving your old self, and becoming better than before.

Talking about your excuses for failure and becoming complacent isn’t gonna cut it. You have to get it through your head. It doesn’t matter how good-looking the other person is, or how supposedly ‘lucky’ he is, or how he has the Midas touch; these are just plain simple way-outs for you to stop trying, stop hustling, and stop upgrading and ultimately quit. 

By letting jealousy get the better of you, you are intentionally or unintentionally closing your own portal to success, your own access point to become better than yesterday. Every second you spend getting jealous of someone, you are missing out on opportunities to enhance and brush up on your strengths.

Whenever you are trying to undermine someone else’s achievements or progress and explaining or defending your screw-up, you are actually botching your own self, and when you do realize this, it’s generally too late. Insulting, criticizing, maligning, defaming, scorning someone out of pure jealousy to make yourself feel better is gonna become the very reason for your own downfall.  

 

Acceptance is the Best Antidote to Jealousy

Acceptance goes a long way in getting rid of jealousy. Accept your flaws, your weakness, your failures, your shortcoming, your blemishes, your imperfections, your limitation, your deficiency, your cracks, your taints—after all they are a part of what makes you, YOU. Don’t ditch it, don’t snub it, and definitely don’t be embarrassed by it—you will be regretting it sooner than later.

This is probably the most opportune moment for me to quote Tyrion L, “Never forget who you are, the rest of the world will not. Wear it like armor and it can never be used to hurt you.”

10 years from now you are gonna be laughing at the mistakes you are making today, provided you have a learning attitude and are able to put aside your bloated ego. And guess what, that is actually a positive sign and a testament that you have improved and become better than yesterday.

So, instead of getting burned out of jealousy, heal yourself by looking at the positive sides of the person. Appreciating, valuing, cherishing, and respecting someone’s strengths, not just for show or to get something in return, but genuinely from the inside, will actually help us grow and inspire us to become better than we were before.

When was the last time you thought, “I really admire how Joe perseveres, which has made him what he is today”, “Lily really worked her ass off to get the deal on the table”, “Matt truly deserves what he has become today as he literally poured in every last ounce of blood, sweat, and tear” or something like this?

Yeah I know it’s really an uphill battle for us to keep aside our enormous pride and genuinely praise someone for their awesomeness, but you don’t have to necessarily say it out loud(though you should), just commending someone in your mind is alright too. It will not only help you get rid of jealousy but will also incentivize you to be a better person.

Yes, you read that right, you can actually leverage someone else’s goodies to have a positive impact on your own self. When you praise someone, you are automatically shifting your focus from weaknesses to strengths, from negative to positive, from bad habits to good habits, from ineffectiveness to robustness. And ultimately you become where your thinking goes.

 

Your Outlook Depends on Who You Are

Instead of praising others what do we do instead? We let our out of the world thinking and energy squander condemning and lambasting others. What we may not realize is that by indulging in such activity we are actually deteriorating our own life. Think about it, if all you can see is the loophole or negativity of the other person, how in the world is it ever gonna benefit you in any way? You digging an even bigger pit to bury yourself in is all you are achieving by letting jealousy get the better of you.

We only see what we actually are from the inside. The human’s pair of eyes work in the exact same way; it’s only our mind’s eyes that make all the difference in the world. Two people may look at the same thing but may have totally contradicting opinions. 

The guy who himself is negative, incompetent, lazy, disrespectful, rude will not be able to look at the positive and bright side of the person even if he wants to. Similarly, a person who is happy, positive, and respectful from the inside will always look at the person’s shining and glittering side. 

The way I look at it, I feel it’s more of a matter of habit. How you see things and perceive situations is more of how you and society have programmed yourself. So, don’t just expect that you will take a complete u-turn merely after reading an article or two on the internet. It’s kind of a lifelong process that you need to stick to. This basically implies that jealousy is a habit. To get jealous of people and impede your own growth is by all means just a habit. And consequently, to get rid of jealousy, you are gonna need to furnish and polish your old habits and carve them into something better.

 

Life’s One Hell of An Unfair Race

For all those, who treat life as some sort of a race, always wanting to get ahead, beat others, and get distressed when they are beaten by others, let me tell you that life’s one hell of an unfair race.

This is perhaps the only race in the world, where the competitors don’t start at the same time. Some start way before you, and some don’t even start long after you; few are using a sports car to surge ahead, while some are stuck at a bicycle; some will reach their destination way before you even when you both started at the same time, and some may never reach their destination at all. That’s a little heads-up from my side to let you know what you are getting yourself into.

If you are so hellbent on defeating others, well, BEWARE! It’s not gonna be a cakewalk. The minute you shift your focus from running your best race to beating others, you will forget the most important thing of this journey, which is to enjoy the ride. Instead, you are busy getting ready to dive into a swimming pool of stress, anxiety, and jealousy. This will become the breeding ground for anger, irritation, annoyance, and restlessness. Even when you beat someone, you will still not be at ease because you will live in this perpetual paranoia of ‘what if someone else overtakes me and I lose my lead?’     

One may also get totally blindsided with the idea of winning this unwinnable race, that he may drop his moral codes, ethics, values, principles, and break the rules and regulations just to stick it to the other party and come out on top. Compromising in these arenas can never make anyone happy and content in the long run. You may become materialistically successful, be at the topmost rung of the ladder, earn a shitload of money by choosing the wrong route, but in the end, you will still be miserable in the other parameters of life.    

In fact, anyone who’s part of the race will never be truly satisfied and content with his position. Either he will always be scraping, looking, and wanting for more, or will always fear losing what he has achieved. That’s not what life is actually meant for.

This Game of Life is not about remodeling a beautiful journey into a nasty race. A journey doesn’t concern itself with ‘who beats who’ or ‘who comes first’. It’s more about how hard you laughed, how deeply you loved, how truly you cared, and how hard you tried. Life is a journey that revolves around ‘you’, instead of what’s happening ‘around you’. Jealousy has got no business in this space, and you better keep it that way. 

Now, just to be clear, I am not asking you to stop running in this race. I have just told you what will happen if you choose to participate in it—don’t whine about how stressful or unfair it is. Nobody has forced you to do so, it’s your own belief system that has made you a part of this stupid, crazy party, which you can leave any time you want.

Oh, and did I forget to mention the perks of what will happen if you see life as a journey? My bad. When you see your life as a journey instead of some cutthroat race or competition, you set your own goal and desires, you choose the time period that suits you, you set your own pace, and the most important part is that you stay firm in upholding your morals, values, and principles. The result of which is that you get rid of jealousy once and for all, because you don’t care if someone is ahead of you or not, all you care about is living a happy, peaceful, and calm life. You rise in your own eyes when you reach your end destination without compromising your ideals and virtues.

 

Fly like a Bird To Get Rid of Jealousy

The foremost feature that lets a bird fly high in the sky, without breaking a sweat is its light-weightedness. A bird can’t possibly take the leap if one attaches stones and rocks to its feathers. Similarly, if you also wanna fly like a bird, not literally of course, then you also have to feel light and swishy. And in order to feel that way, you gotta lose any unnecessary weights or burden that you might have been carrying in this journey of yours.

The tricky part is that these frivolous weights are not exactly visible to the naked eye, so it might pose a problem to get rid of something you don’t see. It’s the negative thoughts swirling in your mind that make you heavy and stressed. And make no mistake, thoughts are way heavier than those boulders. 

You can’t fly with all this heaviness you carry on your shoulder all day long in the form of jealousy, hatred, and anger. The thoughts of criticism, competition, inferiority complex, all due to jealousy, are pretty massive and bulky thoughts, more than capable to take you down with them.

Now, this is actually going against our basic nature. We weren’t meant to be handling all the heftiness, we were meant to feel light and fly. Ever wondered why all the angels you saw on the TV and movies have wings attached to them?

Yeah, you guessed it. Be like an angel and fly internally. We already have wings attached to us, and our souls are pure enough to make us fly high. It’s only our own misunderstanding and flawed belief system that is drowning us in this shithole and deteriorating our energy. If we can amend and fix it, then we will become angels for others—guardian angels.

The angels you would see or meet in real life aren’t gonna be flying around in the air, they will be those who have taken the charge of keeping themselves light by getting rid of jealousy, hatred, and other negative blood-sucking emotions. People around them would have a positive rub-off effect as these angels would emanate positivity all over the place wherever they go.

So, the only thing left for you to ponder upon is that do you also wanna be the source of love, empowerment, joy, and rise by rising others, or do you wanna live a petty and shallow life getting jealous of other people and pinpointing their shortcomings? The choice is yours and your choice is your superpower.

You could be doing absolutely nothing but still, feel heavy and stressed out and on the other hand, you may have your hands full with distinct activities throughout the day but still feel easy and airy. Your mental works play a substantial role in deciding your state. 

Jealousy, as we discussed before, can play a major role in making us feel hefty and bulky. Sometimes we may not even be aware that we are jealous of something or someone. We may be just working on autopilot, without questioning why we are doing what we are doing. The thing here to keep in mind is that jealousy alone is barely the tip of the iceberg. The more pressing issue is that it can also open the flood gates to a plethora of emotions like anger, frustration, stress, anxiety, tension, insecurity and will also make you kiss goodbye to integrity, values, and principles. 

The Abundant Mentality

We think of the world as some limited entity that would just run out of fuel one fine day. In my opinion, this is the primary cause of jealousy amongst people. Somebody tastes a smidgen of success and we start ranting, fearing that the world doesn’t have enough left to quench our thirst.

We can’t possibly live a genuinely happy life with the success of others if we don’t think that there’s enough in this Universe to meet everyone’s needs. And this in turn diminishes our own chances to actually do something worthwhile because we are so busy shoving useless thoughts into our minds that nothing fruitful is ever gonna come out of it.

You reap what you sow, remember? So, quit stuffing in such a nuisance and get rid of jealousy. If someone’s getting more, it doesn’t mean you are gonna get less. Life’s not limited that way, the universe is much bigger than you can possibly imagine. Just look at the numbers and you will see a pattern. 

Wealth is increasing, the population is on the rise, the resources are escalating, the number of billionaires and millionaires is climbing. There is enough resource on this planet to fulfill everyone’s needs, but not enough to quench the greed of even a single person. Keep this in mind.

Once we change our paradigms and tenets and accept the abundant mentality wholeheartedly then and only then can you actually gulp someone else’s prosperity in a happy fashion, which is ultimately gonna help you overcome jealousy, for good. Make no mistake, you have to learn this skill sooner than later. And the earlier you do, the better it is. There will always be someone better, richer, more handsome, more successful, more knowledgeable, more intelligent, more amazing than you are and that’s OK!

 

 

 

Be humble enough to accept that you may not be the best in every arena of life, but be wise enough to realize that you are one of a kind.